Rally Can’t Calm Unease Over Hughes

Evidence of Phil Hughes’s pitching aptitude can be found in highlight videos from the 2009 championship season and the All-Star Game garb he received last summer, when he was selected for the first time, at age 24. So, it does exist. He has seen it.

And so have the Yankees. Just not recently.

After the high-fives and hugs subsided in the wake of a 6-5 comeback victory in 10 innings over the Baltimore Orioles on Thursday night, the Yankees were left to address another poor outing by Hughes. Three starts have passed without his velocity increasing or his command improving, and it is natural to wonder how the Yankees will react.

“It’s frustrating,” said Hughes, who was charged with five runs in four and a third innings. “I feel like I’m bringing nothing to the team right now, and that’s a bad feeling.”

Just as Manager Joe Girardi said he would allow Derek Jeter 100 to 150 at-bats before fully evaluating his performance, he said it would be unfair to judge Hughes based on three starts. In those three starts, spanning 101/3 innings, Hughes has a 13.94 earned run average, and his fastball Thursday averaged a season-low 89.05 miles per hour, according to data on brooksbaseball.net. Without his fastball, Hughes cannot succeed, and as a result the Yankees will almost certainly discuss whether they are best served taking advantage of the two days off next week to skip his turn in the rotation.

There will be plenty of time for those conversations, said Girardi, who nevertheless acknowledged the obvious: “He’s still not quite right, and it’s our job to get him right.”

The Yankees trailed, 5-0, when Hughes was taken out, but a collaboration of efforts — three scoreless innings by Bartolo Colon, an intrepid block of the plate by Joba Chamberlain to thwart a run in the eighth, a game-tying homer in the ninth by Jorge Posada — culminated in the 10th, when Nick Swisher’s sacrifice fly drove in Mark Teixeira with the winning run. Hughes said he was grateful for his teammates’ resilience, and that he wished only that he could contribute.

Certainly the Yankees expected that he would. His ascension from an eighth-inning dynamo to an 18-win wunderkind created lofty expectations, casting Hughes as a linchpin of a potentially shaky rotation. His struggles leave the Yankees reeling with only two established starters (C. C. Sabathia and A. J. Burnett) and the unproven Ivan Nova, with the No. 5 starter, Freddy Garcia, scheduled to make his first start Saturday against Texas.

Their other options include shifting Hughes to the bullpen or sending him to the minors, where he could build arm strength in a less pressurized environment and be guaranteed of regular work, but they seem less likely right now. Last year, the Yankees gave Javier Vazquez, who was struggling to regain his fastball, all of April (five starts) before skipping him once in the rotation.

Hughes is at a similar place, showing that he cannot endure without his fastball, which used to reach 94 m.p.h. regularly. The reactions by hitters have confirmed as much. Of the 96 four-seam fastballs he has thrown this season, just two have generated swings-and-misses.  

“Same old story, I guess,” Hughes said. “I don’t even know what to say at this point.”

Hughes’s velocity was impressive from the outset last year, but that was more of an exception. Historically, Girardi said, it has tended to improve in April after a few starts.

Even so, it remains somewhat confounding how arm strength is still an issue for Hughes, who spent seven weeks building it in spring training.

Hughes agreed, calling it “baffling.” His workload increased gradually in spring training, his throwing program designed to unleash him on opening day at his full capability. With Hughes adamant that he is physically fine, the fact that his arm is still sagging suggests that all the innings he threw last season — 192, a career high — have sapped his velocity.

“Sometimes you just don’t bounce back as quick from one year to another,” Girardi said.

Between starts, Hughes adjusted his delivery with the pitching coach Larry Rothschild, focusing on involving the lower half of his body and driving more aggressively to the plate, a subtle change that, he hoped, would yield improved results. In the first inning, when he retired the side in order, Hughes said his fastball had decent life.

“And then it just disappeared,” Hughes said.

The Orioles pounced in the third, when Nick Markakis drilled a two-run homer, the first of several hard-hit balls. Two — doubles by Markakis and Luke Scott — found open space, but two more were caught at the fence by Curtis Granderson and Swisher, minimizing damage. When Girardi pulled him after 70 pitches, Hughes was hardly surprised. The crowd, accustomed to serenading him with “Huuuuuuuughes,” booed him instead. It was no mistake.

“It seems like there’s 18 days between my starts,” Hughes said. “It’s not a good feeling to have to answer all these questions about how poorly I keep pitching every time out. It’s not a fun thing to deal with.”

INSIDE PITCH

The Yankees’ top pitching prospects, the 23-year-old right-hander Dellin Betances and the 20-year-old left-hander Manny Banuelos, were placed on the minor-league disabled list at Class AA Trenton with blisters on their pitching hands.